At this point, it is worth asking an important question: what should we do with this information? Why does it matter which character from Batman has the most in common with Trump?

But first: are there important Batman characters left to consider?

From “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader” by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert

How much does Donald Trump resemble Lex Luthor?

Lex Luthor, while predominantly a Superman character rather than one of Batman’s friends or foes, resembles Trump in two significant ways: a) he’s a billionaire who b) runs for president (and, frighteningly, is elected) in the DC universe.

From Superman: Lex 2000

The two do share one other key characteristic: a hunger for power. However, Luthor is known for being two-faced, passing himself off as a thoughtful philanthropist (while secretly plotting and inventing.) As previously discussed in the Harvey Dent article, one of Trump’s traits, and potentially his only virtue, is that he is not duplicitous: he has repeatedly revealed his ugliness on the world stage. Continue reading “Which Batman Character Does Trump Resemble Most? Part 6: The Conclusion”→

“Do you feel in charge?”

It is with these words that the power shifts from one man to another in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises, as the terrorist and demagogue Bane rests a hand on the shoulder of corrupt, scheming businessman John Daggett. This is Daggett’s last moment alive, realizing that he staked everything on empowering a brutal man he never controlled. It’s a relevant moment, echoed in the recent power struggle happening within the Republican party.

“Do you feel in charge?”

“Tomorrow you claim what is rightfully yours.” – Bane, to the people of Gotham in The Dark Knight Rises

The majority of Batman characters were created in either 1939 or the 1940s, heroes and villains alike. We have compared Donald Trump to four Batman villains so far, each of which first appeared in the early ’40.s Bane is unlike the rest of these, making his first appearance in 1993.

Bane has two pinnacle stories: the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises and the comic book storyline Knightfall, both of which feature a Gotham plunged into chaos and a broken Batman.

Bane, facing off against Batman.

It is these two stories which will serve as the majority of our comparison between the candidate Donald Trump and the character Bane.

Trump and Bane are both demagogues who inspire a hateful hope in their followers.

This is the second installment in an ongoing series of articles exploring which Batman character Donald Trump resembles most. You can read the first installment here, in which I explain the impetus for this series and compare Donald Trump to Oswald “the Penguin” Cobblepot. Or if you’re interested in reading D. F. Lovett’s fiction, you can buy his books here.

Like many of Batman’s villains, The Scarecrow first appeared in the 1940s. His backstory has gone through some variations, but there are a few universal elements: his weapon is fear, he wears a Scarecrow mask, and he is a disgraced psychiatrist who worked at both Arkahm Asylum and Gotham University before his downfall into crime.

“I am fear incarnate.” – The Scarecrow in Batman: The Animated Series

Unlike most of Batman’s famous villains, Scarecrow had not been seen on film until the Christopher Nolan trilogy. Cillian Murphy portrays Jonathan “the Scarecrow” Crane in all three films, beginning with Batman Begins, in which Scarecrow works with Liam Neeson’s R’as al Ghul to poison Gotham with a weaponized hallucinogen.

Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow in Batman Begins.

One’s first instinct is to think that Trump and Scarecrow are an odd comparison. Trump is a brutish bully with cash, while Scarecrow is a delicate intellectual with a mask. But they have one thing in common: fear.

Both men use fear as their key instrument.

The Scarecrow finds out what you fear, and uses it against you. He does this is many ways. One is to plunge the city into darkness. Another is to use various fear toxins, frightening people to death or leading them to believe that their worst fears are becoming reality.

“He preys on the innocent and instills them with fear. When I chose to wear my costume, it was to prey upon the criminals and instill them with fear.

You either cede power to him because you are afraid, or he is what you fear. Both men have legions working for them, ready to rabidly attacked the next enemy. Scarecrow scares his opponents into not even engaging in a fight, just like Trump’s ability to scare away opponents from taking him on.

Or, “Stop Calling Them Gunmen and Start Calling Them Terrorists”

One of the most notable elements of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is that, despite being made by a British writer and director and set in the fictional Gotham City, the films capture the zeitgeist of the post-9/11 America in a frightening, realistic way.

But there’s one lesson in these films that we don’t seem to have retained: terrorism can take many forms.

Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises, the first and third films in the trilogy, show evil as an extensive international network motivated by belief in a higher cause: the League of Shadows, led first by Liam Neeson and later by Tom Hardy’s Bane. It’s an evil organization which resembles Al-Qaeda or IS/Daesh in its reach and tactics.

Unlike the other two films, in The Dark Knight our villain is Heath Ledger’s Joker: a criminal who seemingly materializes out of nowhere. His background is unknown, with no criminal record or history of violence. He operates as a loner, with a few followers but no peers. He believes not in fundamentalism but in anarchy and chaos. He prefers easily-obtained weapons: in his words, “a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets.” He kills with abandon, targeting mob bosses, murdering his own followers, burning corrupt businessmen alive, turning civilians against one another. Throughout it all, he operates without loyalty and welcomes death.

Perhaps film’s most famous villain of the oughts.

He gives a speech, in one of the more famous moments from the film, explaining why people are so frightened of him. Because he disrupts expectations. He disrupts “the plan.” Because anyone can be his victim, not just “a gangbanger” or “a truckload of soldiers.”

The mass waves of shooters (most of whom are white and “Christian”) overtaking America resemble the Joker in every way: they kill innocents, make spectacles of their crimes, and fear nothing, including death. The American mass shooter is almost always suicidal. There are few mass shooters who begin their killing sprees expecting any outcome aside from death or life imprisonment.

Like the Joker, they cannot be “bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with.”

Like this:

A few years ago, I made the inaccurate prediction that Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, would be an allegorical representation of Sarah Palin. The idea made sense to me at the time. The Dark Knight‘s Batman is arguably a depiction of George W. Bush, Harvey Dent is a stand-in for all politicians, and I imagined that Catwoman would represent one of the most controversial and polarizing female political figures in recent years.

I was wrong. While you can make an argument that Batman is Bush, at least in The Dark Knight, any argument about Selina Kyle being Sarah Palin is a forced conclusion and complete stretch.

Selina Kyle, attempting a disguise.

But I think there is a politician on the scene today whose role in the contemporary political scene could parallel the role that Selina Kyle plays in The Dark Knight Rises. That person is former CEO and presidential candidate Carly Fiorina.

People like to predict that Ben Affleck will fail as the Batfleck. But what this blog post presupposes is, maybe he won’t?

The fact is, Ben Affleck is a good actor who is actually positioned better than any of his predecessors in terms of his ability to play Batman. Here are some of the reasons why.

Chasing Amy

It’s easy to forget that Ben Affleck was in comic book movies when no one cared about comic books. He starred in several Kevin Smith films during the ’90s and ’00s in which the characters were either readers or writers of comics.

One of the moments from Affleck’s early work in which he is literally surrounded by comic books.This includes Affleck as Holden McNeil, a New Jersey comic book writer in Chasing Amy. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a good reference point if you want to see that Affleck knows a thing or two about the comic book world. He also plays the villain in Mallrats, another comic-centric movie by Kevin Smith.

Like this:

You may have seen a sad news story about Lenny B. Robinson, a Maryland man who impersonated Batman to bring joy into the lives of children. Many referred to him as “The Route 29 Batman,” as he could often be seeing driving his Batmobile down this road, including when the police pulled him over and the moment was caught in a video that became viral. Several other news source have properly eulogized him, but I found it worth pausing to consider this legacy.

Lenny B. Robinson, at his home. Photo from The Washington Post, by Jonathan Newton.

A few years ago, I wrote about the phenomenon of men in our world dressing as the hero of Gotham. I suggested that perhaps the greatest thing that makes someone Batman is tragedy, citing specifically the example of Zoltan Nohari, a man living in poverty, hoping to help the police in Slovakia.

People are still complaining about the idea of Ben Affleck as Batman. But, based on the trailers alone, and a few released still images, it’s already obvious that, even at its worst, the new Batman and Superman movie can’t be worse than what has come before it. Batman has bottomed out plenty of times before, but nothing is worse than the 1989 feature film adaptation, directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton. It does not matter what Ben Affleck does or does not do. Nothing is worse than what has already happened.

It’s been out for a while, but there are still two things that bug me about Interstellar.

And no, neither of them is the science of it. I’m not expert in theories of time travel, interstellar travel, worm holes, quantum mechanics, etc. I’m not even very interested in such things. I know that some people explain the science of Interstellar isn’t good, but I don’t care. My two concerns are more from a story and character perspective.

No, my complaints are not related to the over-use of Dylan Thomas.

That’s Some Bizarre Parenting

I am not a parent, so I cannot say that I am 100% correct on this, but something did strike me very strange in Interstellar. When McConaughey is trying to reassure his daughter about his trip into the stars, he says something along the lines of “by the time I return, we might be the same age.” This is bizarre on so many levels. First of all, is he really telling her “it’s okay, because I’m only going to be gone for a couple decades.” And he’s also telling her, “don’t worry, this is going to mess up all the laws of space and time so intensely, that I’m no longer going to be older than you.” Continue reading “My Only Complaints About Interstellar”→

Like this:

Remember The Dark Knight? Who can forget Harvey Dent’s tragic line, the one which foreshadowed both his own downfall and the character arcs of so many of those around him: you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

Choices…

The question I have often come back to is whether Harvey could have ever died a hero. Sure, they gave him a hero’s funeral, a hero’s legend, and a hero’s holiday (the second Monday of Gothamuary, presumably), but we the audience knew that he had been a villain ever since he got half his face burned off and a dead fiancee, and subsequently decided to murder everyone he held accountable.

Or do we? Is it possible that Harvey was a villain all along? Was he a white knight corrupted by The Joker, “the best of us,” as Batman called him, or was he just another corrupt politician with no ethics or heroism to speak of? Continue reading “Do You Believe in Harvey Dent?”→